Catfight: Bobby Kotick Slams EA; EA Fires Back

A war of words has broken out between Activision head Bobby Kotick and Electronic Arts, so let's all get some popcorn, and enjoy the insult hurling and boiling invectives while we wait for the next Fallout game to hit, shall we?

It begins in an interview with Edge, where Kotick offers some choice words about how EA treats their development studios and why the company has trouble keeping the top talents.

"The core principle of how we run the company is the exact opposite of EA," he says. "EA will buy a developer and then it will become ‘EA Florida’, ‘EA Vancouver’, ‘EA New Jersey’, whatever. We always looked and said, 'You know what? What we like about a developer is that they have a culture, they have an independent vision and that’s what makes them so successful.' We don’t have an Activision anything - it’s Treyarch, Infinity Ward, Sledgehammer.

"That, to me, is one of the unassailable rules of building a publishing company. And in every case except for two, the original founders of the studios are still running the studios today. The only thing that we try to do is to provide a support structure to make them more successful. If you do a really good job - and a lot of our studios do - you get to pick what is, in my view, the most difficult thing to pick in the industry: to make original intellectual property."

"Kotick’s relationship with studio talent is well-documented in litigation. His company is based on three game franchises – one is a fantastic persistent world he had nothing to do with; one is in steep decline; and the third is in the process of being destroyed by Kotick’s own hubris."

Blaaaaow. Your move, Bobby Kotick!

In other Bobby Kotick insult-war news, the CEO responded to Tim "Brutal Legend" Schafer's characterization of him as a "total pr*ck" by saying,

"Tim Schafer. The guy comes out and says I'm a pr*ck. I've never met him in my life - I've never had anything to do with him."

"I never had any involvement in the Vivendi project that they were doing, Brütal Legend, other than I was in one meeting where the guys looked at it and said, 'He's late, he's missed every milestone, he's overspent the budget and it doesn't seem like a good game. We're going to cancel it."